HR: 09:15h
AN: SF31B-06    [Abstracts]
TI: Integrating a Community Modeling Environment in the Geosciences Cyberinfrastructures
AU: Zhang, H
EM: hzhang@gscas.ac.cn
AF: The Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, 19 Yuquanlu, Beijing, 100039 China
AU: Zhang, H
EM: hzhang@gscas.ac.cn
AF: University of Missouri-Columbia, 101 Geology Building, Columbia, MO 65211 United States
AU: * Liu, M
EM: lium@missouri.edu
AF: University of Missouri-Columbia, 101 Geology Building, Columbia, MO 65211 United States
AU: Yang, Y
EM: yangyo@missouri.edu
AF: University of Missouri-Columbia, 101 Geology Building, Columbia, MO 65211 United States
AB: Last few decades have seen explosive growth of multidisciplinary data; continuation of such growth is ensured by the Earthscope initiative and other ongoing and future studies. Current efforts of cyberinfrastructure-building are focused on integrating the heterogeneous data bases. However, even with easy access to the vast data bases, it remains a major challenge for scientists to integrate multidisciplinary, multiscale data with proper computer models to facilitate scientific discovery. Comparing with the growth of observational data and the advance of computer hardware, which is fueled by the availability of cheep Linux PC clusters, softwares for geosciences have fallen behind and become a major bottleneck on the path of scientific exploration. We propose a community modeling environment that can be fully integrated with database-oriented cyberinfrastructures. This is achievable because many geological processes can be described by similar, even identical, mathematical equations for which various numerical solvers are available, thus the coding of the major part of many numerical models may be automatized. We will show a prototype of such a system in a study of crustal deformation in the western US. After the model geometry, rheolgoical structure, and boundary conditions are prescribed, the governing equations for the crustal deformation are solved in a 3D finite element model. The core computer codes are generated automatically for multiple-processor Linux clusters. The system can be integrated in distributed geoscience cyberinfrastructures such as the GEON grid (http://www.geongrid.org), and the models can interact with geophysical databases on the GEON grid for input parameters and model constraints. Wheras the prototype of the code-generating system is still preliminary, it has the potential of fundamentally changing how scientists develop and use computer models in the future.
DE: 9350 North America
DE: 8110 Continental tectonics--general (0905)
DE: 8122 Dynamics, gravity and tectonics
DE: 3210 Modeling
DE: 3230 Numerical solutions
SC: Special Focus: Advances in Data Acquisition, Management, Analysis and Display [SF]
MN: 2004 AGU Fall Meeting